Timothy Bates is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wayne State University. He was previously Professor of Urban Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. His other appointments include Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Census Bureau Fellow, and Floyd McKissick visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the field of small business policy, his consulting clients have included the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the City of Chicago Department of Law, the New York State Office of the Solicitor General, and the Chicago Transit Authority. Professor Bates is the author of five books on urban economic development issues and he is currently completing a book on minority entrepreneurship.
Nadia E. Brown is Assistant Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of Sisters in the Statehouse: Black Women and Legislative Decision Making (2014, Oxford University Press) and she is the author of numerous articles focusing on Black women’s politics. Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. Her current research projects address the politics of appearance for Black women candidates for public office.
Rachelle J. Brunn-Bevel is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Fairfield University. Her research examines how students’ race, ethnicity, class, gender, and immigrant status intersect to influence their educational experiences and outcomes. Her work has focused primarily on students attending elite post-secondary institutions, but she is also interested in racial-ethnic disparities in standardized test scores among K-12 students and the unique experiences of female faculty members. She received her MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
W. Carson Byrd is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on the experiences of racial and ethnic minority students in higher education, the different methodological approaches used to understand such experiences, and the theoretical perspectives influencing societal views of race and racism. His research also examines the intersection of social psychological processes and structural and cultural impediments to access and success in higher education such as stereotype threat situations. He received his MS and PhD in Sociology from Virginia Tech.
Kim Ebert is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on how ethnoracial inequality is maintained and contested. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She recently published an article in Social Forces on civic engagement among immigrants (with Dina Okamoto). Her work has also appeared in Latino Studies and Social Problems, and she has a forthcoming piece on discrimination in new and traditional immigrant destinations in American Behavioral Scientist (with Sarah Ovink).
Emily P. Estrada is a doctoral student in Sociology at North Carolina State University. She is an inequality scholar focusing on the symbolic boundaries surrounding immigrant, racial, and ethnic groups. She is currently working on her dissertation, analyzing the extent to which newspaper articles on immigration reinforce, create, or challenge boundaries between nonimmigrant and immigrant groups, and if this boundary-work varies by socio-historical and economic contexts.
Cynthia Feliciano is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in 2003 from UCLA, and has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. Her research investigates the development and consequences of group boundaries and inequalities based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. She pursues these issues through two main strands of research that emphasize the experiences of descendants of Latin American U.S. immigrants: determinants of educational inequality, and ethnic and racial boundary-making and relations. Feliciano is the author of Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation (2006), and numerous articles in journals including Social Problems, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, and Demography.
Herbert J. Gans is the Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University.
Michelle Halla Lore is a doctoral student in Sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research interests span immigration and citizenship; gender inequality; and work and the economy. She is currently conducting dissertation research, examining how gender shapes the experience of attaining U.S. citizenship.
Vincent Hutchings is Professor of Political Science and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn About Politics (2003, Princeton University Press) which focuses on the circumstances under which citizens monitor their elected representatives. His work has been published in Legislative Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Politics, the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, and Public Opinion Quarterly. Hutchings was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar (2000–2002) and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. He is currently the University of Michigan Principal Investigator for the American National Election Study (ANES) for the 2012 election cycle.
Gerald D. Jaynes is Professor in the department of Economics and the department of African American Studies at Yale University. In addition to his teaching and research duties as a professor at Yale, he has served as a legislative aide to State Senator Cecil A. Partee, President Pro-tem of the Illinois State Senate,1971–72; assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and chaired Yale’s Department of African and African American Studies, 1990–1996. He is recognized as an expert on race relations and the economic conditions of African Americans, and has lectured and spoken on these topics at many universities and forums around the world. His research has been cited internationally within forums such as legislative bodies and courts including the United States Supreme Court. Among his more notable publications are: A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (1989); Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South (1986); Immigration and Race: New Challenges for American Democracy (2000); The Encyclopedia of African American Society (2004).
Baodong Liu is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. His most recent scholarly books include The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won, and Race Rules: Electoral Politics in New Orleans, 1965–2006. For his research on racial and electoral politics, Liu has been the winner of the 1999 Byran Jackson Award from the American Political Science Association, the 1999 Ted Robinson Award from the Southwestern Political Science Association, the 2004 Artinian Award from Southern Political Science Association, and the 2001 Jessie Ball duPont Summer Fellow at the National Humanities Center. A former member of editorial board for Urban Affairs Review, Liu also served as the editor of Urban News for the American Political Science Association’s Urban Politics Section; was elected as a co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2006; and was elected to the Board of Directors of National Association for Ethnic Studies in 2013.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he directs the Office of Population Research. He is past-President of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association and current President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His most recent book is Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb, published by Princeton University and coauthored with Len Albright, Rebecca Casciano, Elizabeth Derickson, and David Kinsey.
Michael D. Minta is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is one of the country’s leading experts in the study of the political representation of African American, Latino, and women’s interests in the United States. His book, Oversight: Representing Black and Latino Interests in Congress is a valuable guide for assessing whether diversity in legislatures improves responsiveness to minority interests. Dr. Minta regularly teaches popular courses in U.S. Government pertaining to African American politics, congressional politics, and interest-group advocacy.
Rashawn Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received a PhD in Sociology from Indiana University in 2010. From 2010–2012 he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley/UCSF. Ray’s research addresses the mechanisms that manufacture and maintain racial and social inequality. His work also speaks to ways that inequality may be attenuated through racial uplift activism and social policy. Currently, Ray is working on a series projects centered on the intersections of race, class, and gender. His work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Higher Education, and Journal of African American Studies.
Belinda Robnett is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines how racial-ethnic and gender hierarchies are formed by and maintained within formal and informal societal institutions. Robnett is co-author (with Cynthia Feliciano) of numerous articles on the gendered nature of racial preferences among internet daters. She is the author of How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (1997), and the co-editor of Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State (2002). Robnett is a NSF grant recipient (with Katherine Tate) for a 2012 project, Outlook on Life and Political Engagement. At the Russell Sage Foundation, she is completing her current book, tentatively titled, Surviving Success: Black Political Organizations and the Politics of Post-Racial Illusions.
Jacob S. Rugh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on the intersection of race and space in order to understand the social dimensions of contemporary issues such as disparities in lending and home ownership in the wake of the recent housing crisis; the evolution of residential segregation and discrimination in mortgage lending; and the stratification of African Americans and Latinos by race and class in the Sun Belt and suburban United States. He holds dual Master’s degrees in Public Affairs and Urban & Regional Planning as well as a PhD in Public Affairs with an emphasis on Urban Policy from Princeton University. He currently teaches courses on race and ethnicity, multicultural America, and urban sociology.
Parker R. Sexton is a Survey Associate at Mathematica Policy Research, based in Washington, D.C. He works on several projects, including the National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS), the Child Support Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED), and an evaluation of pilot projects aimed at increasing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation among Medicare’s Extra-Help population. His primary areas of interest are educational and health disparities based on socioeconomic status, mass incarceration in the United States, and drug policy reform. He received his BS in Sociology from Virginia Tech.
Stephen Tuck is a university lecturer in American History at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is We Ain’t What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (supporting audiovisual materials at www.weaintwhatweoughttobe.com). His current projects focus on religion and civil rights, the links between the U.K. and U.S. on matters of racial equality, and the influence of national location on the writing of history.
Nicholas Vargas is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. His research focuses on status distinctions that operate as bases of social inequality and social inclusion/exclusion comprising race and ethnicity, and religion. He is currently researching issues related to racial contestation, the experience whereby one’s personal racial identity does not match how they are perceived racially by others. His peer-reviewed research has appeared in journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, Sociological Perspectives, and Sociology of Religion, among others.
Jessica M. Vasquez is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon. She received her BA in English from Princeton University (1998) and her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). She specializes in race/ethnicity, Mexican Americans/Latinos, family, migration, and intermarriage. Her first book, Mexican Americans Across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities (2011, New York University Press), is on the racial/ethnic identity formation of Mexican Americans and was listed in Choice’s “Annual Outstanding Academic Titles.” She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and is writing her second book on Latino family formation. Her articles have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Perspectives, Sociological Spectrum, and Sociological Forum.
Melissa F. Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The College of the Holy Cross. Weiner’s work examines racial identity formation in the context of education, most recently in The Netherlands, focusing on racializing discourses and practices appearing in diverse classrooms and history textbooks. She has been affiliated with the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (Ercomer) at Utrecht University and the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam. Weiner’s publications include Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (2010, Rutgers), articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Problems, Sociology Compass, The Sociological Quarterly, and Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, and chapters in multiple edited volumes.
Cara Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate of the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is also a Faculty Research Associate of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include public opinion and political behavior; political psychology; and race, ethnicity, and immigration. She is author of Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics (2010, Cambridge University Press), and she has published numerous articles in edited volumes and journals, including Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior.
